


Exactly Like We Were

by iconoclasm



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 3
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-15
Updated: 2016-07-15
Packaged: 2018-07-24 05:37:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7495944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iconoclasm/pseuds/iconoclasm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Amata and Joy used to exchange letters; it’s something she can’t let go of, even when Amata has no way of writing back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Exactly Like We Were

When they were children, Amata and Joy exchanged letters. They were top secret, passed over only when they were sure nobody was watching, and they swore a pinky-promise to destroy the letters rather than let anyone find them.

When Joy discovers them amongst her things years later, two weeks before the end she doesn’t yet know is coming, they’re illegible. Her letters are big and bold where she’s obviously pressed down hard with her pencil, and all her words blur into one. Amata’s handwriting is better – unsurprisingly, she’s always been the eloquent one, whereas Joy has forever been stumbling after her loud and undignified – but her words still don’t make much sense.

Joy shows them to her all the same. They sit together in her room while her father is at work and press their faces close to the print, giggling as they try to make sense of it. Joy likes to pretend she’s too old for giggling now; little girls giggle and she’s almost nineteen.  
For Amata, she makes an exception.

\---

They write notes through all the long years in school. Their class is so small it can’t go unnoticed, but they never get punished. Joy would never say so, but she’s sure Amata being the daughter of the Overseer has something to do with that.

Their notes are far more elaborate now. They spend hours carefully creating their own language so that if their notes are confiscated they cannot be decoded. Joy is sure they’ll never have need of it but she loves the process, loves the way Amata lights up when she settles on a new code word. She loves the idea they have their own tongue to whisper in; something even the all-seeing Overseer can have no eyes upon.

\---

When they’re sixteen and both assigned to very different work stations by the GOAT – Joy to janitorial services, Amata to the supervisory tract – Joy struggles to adjust. A day without Amata is not a day she’s used to. They meet up for food after work and she finds herself talking and talking until Amata laughs and nudges her.

‘You don’t have to tell me everything at once, you know.’

‘I know,’ Joy says, nudging her back. ‘I missed you.’

Amata leans against her, like they’re children huddled together to share a comic book again. ‘I missed you too.’

It’s after that they start recording messages for each other on holodisks. It’s not the same as being together every day, but hearing Amata chat about her day as she scrubs floors is comforting, like she could look over her shoulder and find her there, the same as it was before.

  
\---

Joy spends her first night out of the vault sleeping on Silver’s floor. She has to be out by first light and that’s fine, she’s not going to find her dad here after all. She pretends to be asleep until she hears Silver’s breathing even out then she crawls out into the dark to cry.

Living in a vault left little room for privacy so she’s gotten good at crying quietly. She presses her face against her knees and tries to ignore the dark stains on her sleeves. In the dark, they could be ink spots, not the crusted remains of Jonas’ blood.

When her tears have stopped and her eyes feel swollen she brings up her Pip-Boy. Her intention is to replay the last message from her dad, to try and find something in there she missed in the chaos of before.

She ends up playing her last tape from Amata instead.

‘…I don’t know,’ Amata says, when the tape is nearing its end. ‘I’ll talk to you about it when I see you later. Talking with you always helps me figure stuff out.’  
It’s that which gives Joy her first idea since leaving home.

\---

  
[[RECORDING #1]]

‘Is this…Uh, okay, I think it’s recording,’ Joy squints down her pip-boy, screen barely visible in the glare of the sun. ‘Hi Amata. I know this isn’t uh, really Amata. It’s just my pip-boy and I’m…Shit.’

She clicks off the recording, closes her eyes against the nausea that has been threatening since she woke up. It’s shock, that’s what her father would say. She needs time to adjust. She hates that she’s still hearing his voice in her head after everything, hates that soon she will rise and go to find him despite it.

‘Hi Amata,’ she repeats. ‘I’m sitting outside of a house of this woman called Silver. She’s nice. She thought I was sent by a guy named Moriarty but I told her where I was from and well – I must have sounded pretty pathetic. She let me sleep on her floor.’

She picks up the rusted cup Silver gave her and sips the dirty, foul tasting water. It might not be good for her, but dehydration would probably be worse; the outside world has a heat she’s never known, the sun an overwhelming presence she’s not yet comfortable with.

‘She gave me an idea of where to go though. There’s a city just north of ho – of the Vault. When I finish this I’m going to get on my way; it’s called Megaton. It’s a bit of a walk but I still have the gun you gave me. Thanks for that. I hope you’re okay.’

She thinks of the guards shouting from beyond the door as she said goodbye; remembers the smell rolling from the outside, the screech of the Vault door as it opened. She remembers Amata’s tearful eyes, the way her hands were shaking, the way her lips had felt when Joy had gone in for a hug and decided at the last second to be bold instead.

Amata had kissed her back. There was something in that, even if it was worthless now.

Joy raises her fingers to her chapped lips and lets them linger. ‘Speak soon,’ she finishes at last and clicks off the recording.

 

[[RECORDING #2]]

‘Hi Amata,’ Joy starts. ‘So uh, I got shot.’

She’s staying in Moira’s shop, sleeping in a pile of coats and blankets. Her shoulder is heavily bandaged. She hadn’t had enough caps to pay the doctor, but the Sherriff had covered it for her. Said she was a good kid.

Jonas had called her that a lot. Hearing it again had made her cry but everyone assumed it was because of the wound; she hadn’t corrected them.

‘Turns out being shot sucks,’ she says, making sure to keep her voice down, not wanting to repay Moira’s kindness by keeping her awake. ‘I don’t know what I thought it’d be but…’

The house groans around her. The Vault was far from silent; there were pipes gurgling and machines echoing in the distance but this is different. She feels for a moment as though she’s sleeping in something alive, something disturbed by her presence.

She shivers, grits her teeth, and forces herself to carry on. ‘I found the city I told you about. I’m here now, sleeping on some lady’s floor. It’s not as fun as when we would have sleepovers,’ she’s trying to make a joke, but her voice cracks and the sound that comes out of her is far from laughter.

She clicks off the recording to cry again. Before, she never cried. Now it seems that’s all she’s good at.

‘Sorry. Sorry. The city, right, so I found the Moriarty that Silver told me about. Turns out he owns a bar in Megaton and he knows my dad. Or claims he knows my dad. He said he met me once. Not in the Vault,’ she says. Then adds, whether to clarify to Amata or herself she’s not sure, ‘Which means I wasn’t born in the Vault, if he’s telling the truth. But I know I was born in the Vault. I mean, I’d remember being out here before. No matter how old I was when we came to the Vault, I’d remember.’ There’s the unspoken question there. She would, wouldn’t she? Amata would know what to say. Amata always knew what to say. Joy just talks until she settles on the right words.

‘He’s got a terminal I could hack into, maybe find the truth in there. I’ll probably just break it though, and then I’d get kicked out of the city with no clue where to go. But I was telling you about how I got shot…’ Joy trails off into the story of how she was asked to destroy a town she barely knows, a town where she’s been offered nothing but kindness – albeit some of it obviously fake kindness from people like Moriarty. In the Vault, no matter your opinions, everything fell to the Overseerer in the end. The idea of a whole world where anyone can just do what they want; it excites her. It terrifies her.

‘I wish this thing had a camera, I could show you what my shoulder looks like,’ Joy almost laughs. She knows how Amata would react; can see the scowl in her mind’s eye. But before laughter can take hold the house groans again and she is reminded of how far she is from her, how far away she is from everything. She will never see Amata’s face again and that hurts worse than her shoulder.

‘I miss you,’ she says instead of laughing and clicks the recording off.

 

[[RECORDING #10]]

  
‘Hi Amata. There are tunnels that run under the ground, like the Vault is underground but not. They’re called: metro tunnels. They used to be used for transport, there are these huge metal carts that are called metro trains and – shit-

‘Sorry, it’s all okay. It’s so creepy down here, there’s no light. I never used to think in the Vault about the fact we were living under so much earth. It’s sort of hard to forget down here, I feel like this place is gonna close in on me.’

 

[[RECORDING #15]]

‘Hi Amata. Today, I met a supermutant. More like five supermutants-’

‘Civilian, what’s the delay? Thought you wanted into the tower.’

‘I’m coming! Sorry, I’ll tell you more later, I’m about to go into a radio tower. Apparently, my dad came through here. Can’t think what he’d need a radio for but, whatever. Nothing makes sense out here-’

‘Civilian!’

‘Sorry I’m coming! Ending it here - I miss you, A.’

 

[[RECORDING #17]]

Joy leaves her Pip-Boy recording long after she means to switch it off. The end of the tape is footsteps, gunfire, her gasping in pain. She falls, landing awkwardly on her arm.

The recording ends to the sound of crunching gravel.

 

[[RECORDING #20]]

‘Hi Amata. Guess who found a dog?’

She holds her Pip-Boy out and Dogmeat starts to bark. Joy lets it record for a solid minute, her laughter an echo in the background.

 

[[RECORDING #23]]

‘Hi Amata. I’m recording this inside a pre-war museum! Listen to this-’

Joy holds her Pip-Boy up as she walks through the Museum of Technology’s hall about life in a Vault. Not for the first time, she wishes for a camera, so Amata could see the exhibits showing just how wonderful life in a Vault is going to be. Some of it is familiar, sure. Plenty of it isn’t.

She walks through the whole length of the hall again, letting her Pip-Boy pick up the audio. She tries to picture what Amata’s reaction would be. Would it make her laugh? Would she find it interesting? She should know. She spent every day for nineteen years with her – she should be able to guess.

But four months is enough to make her memory foggy, apparently.

She ends the recording without saying goodbye.

 

[[RECORDING #34]]

‘I’ve found a city on a boat,’ Joy starts up the recording before she settles to sleep at night. Rivet City croons around her, rust and metal, a blissfully familiar sound. If she closes her eyes, she can pretend when she opens them again Amata will be there.

‘I told a store owner it was like living in a Vault again. She looked at me strange – everyone looks at me strange when I tell them I’m from a Vault. Maybe I should stop saying it, people looking at you strange is never a good sign. Usually means they’re gonna try to shoot you or rob you or shoot you then rob you.’

She pauses, running her fingers through Dogmeat’s fur. The bed is too small for one woman and a big dog, but she prefers the comfort of having him near.

‘I found a woman who knew my parents. My mother,’ she says and stops. She has never been good at talking about her mother; Amata was the only one who understood the strange hole in your chest that is growing up motherless. ‘She told me about my mother.’

And so she tells Amata what she’s learnt. For once, she feels unashamed to cry.

 

[[RECORDING #38]]

‘Amata, today I met a robot! Not like Andy, this one was called Harkness and he’s an android. He escaped from the person that made him and I helped him escape again. It felt good – there’s so much bad stuff going on out here, Amata. I want to help put it to right. I don’t know if that’s…Maybe I’m being stupid. But I want to try.’

 

[[RECORDING #42]]

‘I found vodka, A! I mean, I’m always finding vodka. But today I decided to drink the vodka; I’ve got a real room for a night, with a door and everything. So I’m drinking vodka. You remember when we found Stanley’s alcohol stash? I’m still sorry about vomiting on your shoes. I’m sure this time will go better – only got my own shoes to vomit on for one.’

 

[[RECORDING #43]]

‘It didn’t go better.’

 

[[RECORDING #47]]

‘The shock of seeing someone die has worn off. I was sick the first time I shot a guy but now I just stop to strip him of his ammo. I wish I knew what that meant. I bet you’d know.’

 

[[RECORDING #56]]

‘What’s with the messages?’

Joy glances up from her Pip-Boy, surprised. She hadn’t thought Charon would notice, or care to notice, about her growing collection of recordings. ‘They’re letters.’

He huffs and looks away from her, away from their make-shift camp and towards the dark of the city. ‘You ever gonna send them or just let them rattle around in your pack forever?’

She has been wasting holodisks on them, she knows that. She doesn’t care. It’s been months, almost a year, since she left the Vault, every day she forgets details about it, small things that add up to a clear picture: one day she will forget it all. Even Amata.

‘They’re not the sort of letters you send,’ she answers.

He looks back at her. Keeps looking, though she doesn’t think he’s waiting for an answer. She doesn’t have one for him anyway, not a good one. Not one that would satisfy either of them. So instead she turns away and tries to go to sleep.

She used to fall asleep immediately in the Vault. She can’t remember how she did that.

In the morning she realises she forgot to stop recording; the tape cuts out at the two hour mark, to the sound of her gentle snores. She doesn’t delete it.

 

[[RECORDING #69]]

‘What do you think we’d be like if we never had parents? I found this town today called Little Lamplight and it’s all kids, not a grown up in sight. It wasn’t the weirdest thing I saw today either. But – I’ll tell you that later. What do you think you’d be like if you didn’t have your dad growing up? I’ve been thinking about who I’d be if I’d had mom and not dad. Or if I’d had neither. How much of me do you think is because of dad? I’m gonna think on it some more. I’ll fill you in when I decide.’ 

 

[[Recording #72]]

‘I found my dad, Amata,’ Joy says. Her voice is a whisper. Behind her the cold of the Jefferson Memorial presses against her back, seeping into her bones. She’s not shivering because of the chill though. Her father is inside. She knows she should be smiling, celebrating.

She knows why she isn’t.

‘It’s been so long I think a part of me stopped believing I’d find him. And now I have and…Will you tell me I’m being dramatic if I tell you I’ve found a stranger?’ Joy tips her head back and stares at the stretch of sky, tries to remember what it was like to look up and only see endless metal. ‘There was so much about him I didn’t know. So much I still don’t know. I think I preferred not knowing.’

She could go on. Tell Amata about how lonely she is, about how she’s tired of never being able to sleep without one hand on her gun. Three Dog calls her the Lone Wanderer and she hates him a little for it; she doesn’t want to wander, especially not alone. If she’s alone at the end of it all then what’s the point, she might as well not exist at all. The Capital Wasteland is full of ghosts; she’s starting to feel like one of them.

She ends the recording without saying anything. Amata isn’t listening. Amata has never been listening.

 

[[RECORDING #73]]

‘My dad is dead. I just needed to say that out loud, I think. My dad is dead and I watched him die.’

 

[[RECORDING #74]]

‘I heard your message, Amata. I’m on my way.’

 

\--  
The Vault smells like the outside in a way it shouldn’t; it smells of blood and bullets. Joy raises her arm to her nose and sniffs, sure it must be her, that she has carried the scent in and contaminated the place.

It’s not her. She reminds herself of what Amata’s message said; the Vault has been rotten for a long time. Perhaps it always was and she could just never see it.

She grips her rifle tighter and walks.

\--  
Amata looks older. It has been over a year and Joy knows she’s nothing like the girl she was. But somehow she had expected Amata to be the same; like the Vault would have preserved her, kept her exactly as she was before.

‘It’s really you,’ Amata says when Joy steps into the clinic. ‘I didn’t think…’

‘Sorry if I’m late,’ Joy says. ‘I don’t know how long the broadcast was running for before I…’

Her hair is shorter. Still in its practical ponytail but there are loose strands clinging to her forehead. Joy remembers how she would fuss with it before, wonders why she doesn’t now, realises the state of the Vault is her answer. The state she caused, the state her father caused. But her father is dead and ghosts can’t fix their messes; so it falls to Joy.

‘You two done staring at each other?’ Butch cuts in. He doesn’t look the same either, it’s like he’s finally grown up and with it grown harsher.

‘Just about,’ Joy says and smiles at Amata.

Amata smiles back; it’s everything and nothing like Joy remembers.

 

\---  
For all the messages she recorded, she’s speechless now. It might be because she has the Overseer’s blood on her hands. She wasn’t the one to shoot him – she’s not sure who was. There was a fight. A confrontation she couldn’t control, an argument she didn’t have the charisma to calm. She thinks it might have been Butch who fired the shot, but she can’t say for sure. All she knows is she’s as guilty as if she had shot the Overseer herself.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says, because she has to say something. They’re the only ones in the Overseer’s office, Amata isn’t looking at her, hasn’t looked at her since she came back with the news. ‘I didn’t want to…’

‘Kill him,’ Amata says flatly. She’s sat behind the Overseer’s old desk, her shoulder’s slumped, her head turned down towards her lap. ‘You didn’t want to kill him. But you did.’

Joy has never heard a voice sound so soft and cruel in equal measure. She could argue she didn’t do the killing, that she in fact tried to stop the bleeding, but she did, as much as Butch, as much as her own father when he set this in motion a year ago. ‘I really didn’t,’ she says. ‘He was your dad.’

‘Yeah,’ she agrees, her voice thick. ‘He was.’

In all her months of wandering and recording; Joy had never imagined this. She stands on the other side of the desk, closer than she has been since she left, but she can’t think of a way to bridge the final few steps between them.

‘You need to leave,’ Amata says. ‘For good.’

‘Can I stay one more night?’

Amata looks up at her at last. Her eyes are shiny with tears, her mouth shuddering. Despite this, she looks closer to yelling than crying. ‘What?’

‘It’ll be dark outside by now. I can be gone by first light. You won’t have to see me leave.’

Amata stares at her. Joy realises that night and day are just concepts to Amata, to the whole Vault save a few, the same as they were to her once. The dangers of the night don’t exist in the Vault, none of the individual dangers that exist out in the Wasteland exist to Amata. And soon, she’ll be in charge of the Vault trading with that world.  
People will take advantage, extort their naiveté and willingness to trade. Or worse. Financial extortion is one of the tamer things she’s seen out in the Wasteland.

She should warn her, she should try and educate her. But her father’s blood is drying around her nails; Amata will not listen. She should not have to listen.

‘I promise you won’t have to see me.’

It’s her first decision as Overseer. She allows Joy to stay.

 

\---  
Joy is gone by the time Amata wakes. The room she slept in is immaculate, with no signs she was ever there – except for the one, obvious sign that Amata is trying not to think about, the sign that leaves her with an office and a job she’s not equipped to handle.

Butch is gone too. Apparently he left with Joy, talking loudly about how he’d be happy to never see the Vault again. When Amata hears the news she’s glad, then swings to feeling guilty, then back to glad. Butch isn’t prepared for life outside she’s sure, but it was the pair of them that killed her father regardless of who actually fired the gun. The Vault is better off with them gone.

In her father’s office – her office – she finds a stack of holodisks. There are over fifty of them piled on the desk, she’s never seen so many together. She picks up one of the tapes at random and turns it over in her hand: ‘RECORDINGS 32 – 34’ is printed on the front. It’s Joy’s handwriting. Amata would recognise the large, unruly letters anywhere.

They used to exchange messages like this once; back when they were separated for work for the first time. Amata’s hands clench around the disk. Has Joy been recording messages for her out in the world this whole time?

Grief makes her want to throw them all out of the door for the Wasteland to take back. But nineteen years of friendship – and more, she hasn’t forgotten that dry-lipped kiss, she’s sure she’ll never forget it - make her keep the tapes instead. They get shoved into a drawer at the bottom of the desk. She’ll listen to them if there ever comes a time where she can hear Joy’s voice without thinking of her father, dead on the floor, his blood coating Joy’s hands so red and bright it looked like something out of a comic book.

\---

Two weeks later and she’s all but forgotten the tapes. The Vault consumes every waking minute and she’s glad of it, time to think is the most dangerous time.

After a particularly long day she heads back to her office, throws herself into the chair, catches her leg on the edge of the desk as the chair rolls backwards. The desk rattles; the tapes inside the bottom drawer clattering together.

Amata stares at the drawer, wary. By listening to the tape she knows she’ll be opening a door she can’t close. But maybe there’ll be useful information on the tapes for trading – Joy has been out in the Wasteland for a year, maybe she made recordings of how people trade and prices of goods.

In her heart of hearts, Amata knows Joy isn’t the type to record anything useful. She ignores that, chooses to focus on her justification and searches for the first tape anyway.  
Her Pip-Boy takes a few seconds too long to load the tape; Amata knows it must be broken, it’s been a year, the sound will be damaged or –

‘Is this…Uh, okay, I think it’s recording. Hi Amata. I know this isn’t uh, really Amata. It’s just my Pip-Boy and I’m…Shit.’

The sound of Joy’s voice kicks the air from Amata’s lungs. She clicks off the recording and closes her eyes, reeling from the shock of it. She’s not sure why it hits her so hard, she saw Joy in the flesh only a few weeks ago. But this voice belongs to the Joy she remembers; the one that came into the Vault and killed her father had a harder note to her, a rougher edge. The Joy on the tape is her Joy; earnest and unsure in equal measures.

She takes a deep breath and starts up the recording again. She has a lot to get through before morning.

\---

A week later, Amata wakes to the beep of her Pip-Boy. She’s set an alarm to wake her at five, when the sun outside should be rising. She fills two flasks with water, sipping one on the way to her office. When she gets there and places them into her pack she decides two won’t be enough and fills another, then one more.

Into her rucksack – an old thing she traded for last week, with more holes than she’d like- she also places a small collection of food, some paper and pencils, four stimpacks, a stash of caps that rattle when she lifts the bag up to place on her back.

She straps a security baton to her belt. She places a small pistol in a holster and it rubs awkwardly when she walks; she should have taken some time to get used to it.  
Gomez is waiting for her at the door.

‘You sure about this, kid?’

She’s never been more sure of anything.

‘Take care of the Vault for me, Gomez,’ she says.

The door rolls open and the Wasteland stretches out in all directions. Above it is endless sky. She was right to set her alarm; the sun is rising, casting the new world in a hazy glow. And somewhere out in the dust, she will find Joy. Amata hopes she won’t be hard to find; she has replies to make.


End file.
